Within the INSHAPE project, Flagship company collaborations have served as concrete testbeds for how European cross border cooperation can move innovations closer to the market. When examining several collaborations side by side, clear shared success factors emerge—independent of country, technology, or business model.
Identifying these lessons is essential not only for understanding the progress of current Flagship cases, but also for applying them directly to INSHAPE Open Call collaborations – the next wave of participating companies.
Learning nro 1: Strategic fit matters more than technology alone
One of the strongest success factors across Flagship collaborations is strategic complementarity between partners. Successful projects are not built merely on compatible technologies, but on a shared understanding of why the collaboration makes sense for both parties. When partners share a common strategic direction—whether toward performance, rehabilitation, wellbeing, or community engagement—it becomes significantly easier to make coherent decisions about product design, pilot environments, target users, and routes to market.
Examples include:
- Blautic and Synerplier, where strategic complementarity has been emphasized from the outset through a clear division of roles between technology ownership and market understanding. While a concrete pilot use case is still being identified, this shared strategic direction already helps clarify the target users, the problem being addressed, and the potential path to market.
- Comeback Center – Embedded Fitness, combining clinical expertise with a scalable digital platform
- Toisintekijät – MindHacker, where service design and GenAI development are jointly explored across both Worklife and sport segments
In these collaborations, both partners can clearly articulate how the cooperation supports their longer term strategy.
👉 Key learning: partner selection should focus not only on capabilities, but on how strategic goals reinforce each other over time.
In practice, I3-INSHAPE has actively supported this by guiding collaborations to articulate, already at the early stages, why the cooperation matters for their future business and what shared outcome they are aiming to build together. This early strategic clarification has helped create a common direction, strengthen commitment, and lay the foundation for collaboration that extends beyond the initial project scope.
Learning nro 2: Focus enables progress
Many Flagship collaborations started with multiple potential markets or use cases. However, real momentum emerged only once the collaboration deliberately narrowed its focus. By consciously choosing what to prioritise first — and what to postpone — partners were able to align their efforts, allocate resources more effectively, and make clearer decisions around product development, piloting, and market entry.
INSHAPE supported collaborations in aligning early on by introducing an 11‑point Action Plan that defined a shared project roadmap. During implementation, the Action Plan has functioned as a living backbone for the project, continuously revisited and adjusted as the collaboration evolves.
Examples of focus‑driven choices in INSHAPE Flagship collaborations:
- YouFo – Mandragora Esports concentrates first on digitalising competition and tournament management before broader expansion (SMES (YouFo, Mandragora, Competize)
- CSE – SevenMila tests a clearly defined event concept before scaling the model further, allowing assumptions around value creation, target users, and market fit to be validated before broader rollout.
The ability to prioritise is a recurring pattern in collaborations that continue to move forward.
👉 Key learning (especially relevant for the Open Call and the next wave of collaborations): In I3-INSHAPE, collaboration works best when companies focus on building one clear route to market first, rather than trying to solve everything at once. Establishing early focus creates the foundation for learning, iteration, and sustainable growth.
Innovation Support Program – A shared framework for progressing collaboration
Across all progressing Flagship collaborations, development follows a similar logic supported by the INSHAPE Innovation Support Program: partner matching → shared Action Plan → needs identification → targeted support services → piloting → commercialisation → scaling.
This structured approach gives companies a common rhythm and vocabulary for collaboration. It also helps maintain progress when technical challenges, business uncertainties, or day-to-day operational pressures arise.
Importantly, the same framework is designed to support INSHAPE´s Open Call collaborations, ensuring that new companies can benefit directly from the lessons learned through Flagship projects.
From Flagships to the next generation
The Flagship collaborations demonstrate that successful co-development is rarely accidental. It is built on:
- strategic fit between partners
- disciplined focus on a defined market entry point
- structured support that adapts as collaboration evolves.
By systematically capturing and applying these lessons, I3-INSHAPE strengthens its ability to support future sport and vitality innovations, giving the next generation of collaborations a stronger starting position from day one.
Author:
Anri Vuori, LADEC
